ESPN Presents X Gams 16 App

Android fans have grown to love our little Android skateboarding, and ESPN has invited Andy to serve as our tour guide to one of the most intense sports competitions around with X Games 16 for Android with an ambitious goal: “We Need Total Coverage!” HST

“The X Games app provides complete schedules, competition info, and athlete bios…” of the X Games 16 events. And in terms of the X Games schedules and information it shines. I have long wished for event organizers to create a truly complete event schedule for longer festivals and sporting events. ESPN nailed this.

As there are many different events occurring throughout the X Games they added the ability to purchase tickets for individual events. This is a great idea and hopefully it will be implemented in more applications similar to this. You can also choose to mark the events that you would like to follow throughout the games. This allows you easy access to the information that you find most important.

There are also Bios of the athletes. These include the typical stats height, weight, age, year stated, year pro, hometown, etc. This is followed by three columns allowing you to see a little bio, news, and competition history.

Finally there is the option to share your thoughts, the events you are planning to go to, and an option to take photos to upload immediately, as well as to send them easily to twitter and facebook. All of these features make this app work very well.

Unfortunately, it’s not without it’s issues. A few times the app would slow to a standstill. I tried this on two phones and ran into the same issues. Also, some of the news links in the athlete bios take you to an ESPN go site. My Evo is running Froyo with verified Flash working, but I could not use the internal browser inside the app to view the pages. I decided to test it, so I loaded it up in my browser and was able to see everything.

I don’t want to seem petty but if you offer everything in one, it should work. And if it doesn’t then by all means have links open into another application. My other issue was having Flash requirements for some aspects of the app when the majority of users do not yet have Flash compatible phones. This takes away from the experience. I must take my hat off because the app was ambitious and exceeded my expectations. ESPN really set a high mark for other developers and companies to reach.

Verdict: Very good application with a few issues. If I had been at the X Games I think this would have been indispensable to me. I applaud the ESPN X Games and their development team. They really put together a very handy and usable app. Despite my few issues I think that they have shown a great deal of innovation with this and I can’t wait to see what they can do for the next X Games.

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